Juneteenth and the lack of black lives in US curricula

[Dill]

(06-20-2020, 01:04 PM)Millhouse Wrote: I just hope going forward schools everywhere will teach history for what it was, not to promote some propaganda agenda from whoever decides what is taught. History should be taught in it's rawest form, from it's primary sources, not from current political views.

Mill, you put up a thoughtful post. I just want to qualify the above a bit.

It is really impossible to teach history in its "rawest form," just as it would be impossible to report news that way. Editorial decisions are required, and in the case of history, they are determined by what is available and in what quantity. E.g., we have stacks of Civil War letters still extant from Union officers to family, friends, and government officials, but fewer from black men serving then, and virtually none from slaves, though today the latter's might be deemed very important. That fact alone builds a white man's perspective into the "rawest" of primary sources.

If we present such history as "raw," then we naturalize that perspective as the only possible one. Like there is some objective viewpoint above politics and history, which just happens to accord with the dominant class view. That has actually happened in the past, and when new historians came along and tried to rectify this limited perspective with books about blacks serving, their efforts were often called "agenda driven" and "propaganda."

Also there is only so much "bandwidth" in a HS or college course; imagine students trying to read primary data for a single event, like Lee's retreat from Gettysburg. Then imagine trying to teach US history from the founding to the present, using primary sources. Very difficult, especially given how difficult our founding documents are simply to read even for college students. Good to use primary sources, yes, but for students, someone would have to do a lot of selecting, editing, and digesting for them, which cannot be done without a point of view regarding what is important and what not.

The alternatives though are not limited to either 1) an impossible "raw history" or 2) "propaganda."

Serious historians are all about advancing our knowledge of history, letting the chips fall where they may; and they are bound by the same standards of integrity and observation which hold for journalists or scientists. A historian who wanted to write about the Civil War today would probably be prompted by a "gap" he perceived in existing work. In addition to reading what scholarly work had already been written in that area, he/she would likely have to travel around the country looking at letters in private collections, old news papers, court records and the like. Without some "thesis" or other, he/she would be unable to sort out what was useful or not from all those sources.

For most other historians, it would be quite ok if this work were written to address current political issues, or were even driven by them, provided it produced verifiable knowledge, especially "new" knowledge. They also understand that "the truth" is not going to be found in one book or books written from one perspective. It is important to have perspectival and methodological diversity, and just as with scientists, they honor an evolving consensus about what counts as true or "most true" at any given moment.

In the case of HS students, I certainly support Bpat's efforts to integrate digitalized primary sources into the curriculum, so students can see where historians get their knowledge. Hopefully he is positioning them to compare primary sources with what historians, past and present, have said about them.